The critic of today’s art is ironically its biggest benefactor: Perry has taken a fifth-rate talent and made himself an old master. In the great game of contemporary art, Grayson Perry is a master. He has perfected the move that trumps all others: denouncing the art world from within. His Reith lectures, to be broadcast on Radio 4 […]
Donald Judd once wrote that an artist’s main challenge is to find “the concatenation that will grow” — in other words, an artistic preoccupation that will sustain a lifetime of development, not peter out by the third or even second show.
Christopher Wool is one of many painters who have experimented with bringing their medium to extinction. They strip it of familiar attributes like imagery, brushwork or flatness, often ending up with some kind of monochrome that suggests the last painting that could possibly be made. Again and again, these works make viewers ask, in effect: […]
The bookmaker’s favourite to win is Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley whose piece Life Model features a larger than life naked male robot. Show-goers are encouraged to take part by drawing the model and their efforts are displayed around the gallery. Among the best known artists in the running for the £25,000 prize money is Berlin-based […]
Art fairs have their dos and don’ts. If you Google “negotiating at art fairs,” few results come up; it may be a taboo subject—and a common pratfall for beginner collectors—but haggling happens, and it’s a veritable part of the art-buying game, for better or worse.
Crotchless trousers, baths of excrement, John Cage, Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic … in the first of a series of exclusive films with the Tate, in which stars give potted histories of art movements, Frank Skinner opens up the wild world of performance art.
By far the most common topics of discussion and consternation in the art world these days are the four behemoths. Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace are the bull elephants of the field, galleries that galumph everywhere all the time, Hoovering up artists and money and monopolizing attention. Jerry Saltz on the Trouble […]
‘Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,’ at the New Museum. “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures” at the New Museum is a superb survey, but also a kind of transfiguration. It liberates the Los Angeles-based Mr. Burden from the clutches of history, expanding and rebalancing our understanding of his art.